Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Mid-Week Floor Plan Porn: Bruce Barnes at The Dakota

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Today is a travel day for Your Mama so we don't have the time to prattle on (and on and on) like we usually do about some celebrity owned (mc)mansion. Instead, and in order to keep the children's real estate appetites whetted, we're gonna be relatively brief (and not very snarky) and serve up some hardcore floor plan porn in the form of a sprawling park-view apartment at the legendary Dakota building on New York City's Upper West Side. Later we'll have us some real estate porn dessert with a less artisnial-feeling
and much less expensive but still insanely swank Fifth Avenue penthouse
on the Upper East Side.

First up, an approximately 5,100 square foot sixth floor spread at the Dakota listed in early April (2012) with a sky-high asking price of $26,900,000 and owned for the last 17 years by a low-profile financier and philanthropist named Bruce Barnes. Mister Barnes is—or, until recently, was, we're not sure—the president of the powerful and sometimes capricious board at the Dakota.

Although in a letter to the board and other residents (quoted in the Post via The Observer) he explained his desire to downsize was because his "apartment is very large for two people, and several of the rooms are rarely used," there has been some speculation Mister Barnes' decision to resign his post as Mister
Dakota Board President and sell his Dakota digs after 17 years may (or may not) have something to do with the ugly and, as far as we know, ongoing brouhaha that ensued when hedge fund fat cat Alphonse "Buddy"
Fletcher Jr.—one of the buildings few black residents and a former board
president—filed a racial discrimination 'the story goes, for his mother's use.

The 10-room apartment, according to the floor plan included with current listing information (above), has a rare and eye-popping 100 feet of above-the-trees Central Park frontage. The current configuration allows for 2 proper bedrooms with 3 bathrooms including a master suite with private study and walk-in closet. The attached master bathroom has honed onyx detailing and 5 antique shower heads in the party-sized shower.

There are 7 working wood-burning fireplaces, including one in the mahogany-paneled entry vestibule and two in the master suite. Floor to ceiling windows in the 650-plus square foot formal living room open to two Juliet balconies and one itty-bitty terrace off the master bedroom has the swooniest of swoony views that encompasses the entirety of Central Park, the towers of Midtown and the hoity-toity apartment buildings that line Fifth Avenue and Central Park South.

The fully modernized yet immaculately preserved apartment—it has an almost hidden central air conditioning system, a luxury not available in the 1880s when the Dakota was built—retains much if not all of its original 19th-century architectural detailing that includes 12-foot ceilings, heavy plaster moldings, hand-carved wood work, pocket doors, and extra-deep wood-lined window frames.

Mister Barnes and his man-friend Joseph Cunningham have fairly well filled the apartment with a thoughtfully curated (and no-doubt hidjously expensively) collection of Arts and Crafts
hoozygoozies and
whatchamacallits and the furniture is almost all exquisite Mission style
stuff that Your Mama imagines to be pedigreed, papered and museum
quality.

Other high profile residents of the Dakota include Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, Maury Povich and Connie Chung (who own two apartments) and Yoko Ono (who, it is our understanding, owns several apartments and reportedly brings sushi to the annual, residents only pot luck/meet-n-greet.)

Although the apartment is one of the largest in the building it is also by far the most expensive
unit currently on the open market. The next most expensive unit currently available is an approximately 4,500 square foot fourth floor unit with no direct park view. The Barnes' apartment is also priced well above the highest price
ever paid for an apartment in the building. That was for Lenny
Bernstein's simalarly-sized second floor place that sold in 2008 for
$20,500,000 to Cheryl and Philip Milstein, a real estate executive heir
to a substantial and diversified fortune built primarily on real estate
and banking.

These guys are serious art collectors, so the apartment makes perfect sense. Bruce Barnes and Joseph Cunningham are the curatorial director and founder of the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, dedicated to the Art and Crafts period. Bruce Barnes' Arts and Crafts collection is one of the best in the world. He was embroiled in a pretty nasty $9 million lawsuit with the art dealers he worked with for several decades, not sure how the case was resolved.

Hmmm. What am I missing? Huge place but only two bedrooms? Also, master bedroom has a very small walk-in closet and the other bedroom doesn't even have a closet at all. I know. Maybe they don't use the second bedroom, but if you did where would you put your clothes? There's only two more tiny closets in the entire apt-one in the dining room and one off the hall.

The Craftsman Movement with its related Mission furniture sought to express qualities of morality and health within the domestic mileau. Gustav Stickley and William Morris created designs for comfortable interiors, and Gertrude Jekyll profoundly contributed to modern and spontaneous-appearing garden design.

The Dakota always makes the Rabbi salivate, and the preserved architectural details of the Barnes-Cunningham apartment are absolutely delicious. Unfortunately, the museum-quality furniture and decorative arts collection as arranged present as uninviting, low-cal, and uncomfortably "brown," as succinctly expressed by DC Guy. And the allegations concerning Mr. Barnes and the board, if true, would certainly not be kosher.

Thanks, Mama, for serving the Children a gezunte Dakota spread. May we now please have our Fifth Avenue penthouse dessert?

It has a view. Wow. And you get to look at a sea of ugly brown for that money. I can seriously smell the old lady scent coming from those pictures (or in this case, old gay man). What a deal! What a great country!

This was a gut to bones re-do or re-hab. my grandmother had a laundry room of the kitchen where the irish girls came 2 days a week to do the ironing. Then there was 1or 2 maids rooms. The kitchen, the large serving butlers pantry. etc.All the bedrooms had closets eceptsmall one at end of hall which had an armoire. The staff lived up near the roof.in 1963 you could have bought this apt for about $30-35k. judy Holiday was 1st celeb to live there but she got in because she was a 'widow lady"

Compare this place to the similarly-priced (but far bigger) Schneider townhouse that was featured on here a couple months ago. This place is not in the same league, not even close. It does have a semi-decent view; but really, would you want to put up with a co-op board and this lackluster place for that and the cache of saying you live at the Dakota? I know where I'd rather live. The price seems ego- or greed-driven.

Alphonse Fletcher is just a bitter queen who didn't get his way and then got all prissy about it. His hedge fund is in the toilet, yet this girl wanted to buy another apartment for his mom and actually thought he could afford it? Bitch pleeze.

Lolll @ 9:46. If you're looking for a "classy" blog, youd best look elsewhere. Mama and her children (us) are anything but classy and mainstream. We pull no punches, and we tell it like it is. Whoever thinks this poop brown hot mess is worth $27 mill is living in a fantasy island not far from Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson.